It has been five years since Major League Soccer granted the creation of Real Salt Lake by awarding an expansion franchise to owner Dave Checketts, and a lot has changed.

Not just for the team, either.

While RSL has evolved markedly from the embarrassing collection of castoffs that strained to win only four games in its inaugural season, so too has the league itself morphed into something far more substantial than it was just five years ago.

Not only did RSL and Chivas USA usher in a new era of expansion -- the league that had contracted down to 10 teams before RSL and Chivas came along will have nearly doubled to 18 by 2011 -- but ownership has diversified, corporate sponsorships and media exposure have improved dramatically, and far more teams enjoy playing in their own stadiums, and reaping greater financial rewards as a result.

What's more, the landmark "designated player" rule opened the door for international superstars such as David Beckham, Cuauhtemoc Blanco, Juan Pablo Angel and Freddie Ljungberg to join the league and attract new fans, and a new generation of coaches such as RSL's Jason Kreis who once played in the league have begun to bring new ideas and forge new styles.

"It went from an industrious little league with high hopes to a fierce business with high expectations," former RSL general manager Steve Pastorino said.

To be sure, the league still operates on a much smaller scale than professional baseball, football and basketball -- you could build the six newest stadiums in the league twice for about the same cost as the luxurious new Yankee Stadium in New York -- but clearly both it and soccer have made significant strides since RSL first appeared on the radar.

"We think it is a sport that represents a new America," commissioner Don Garber recently told a group of newspaper editors. "Soccer in this country has made it."

Turning things around

Tales of the old days in Major League Soccer are not hard to come by.

Broadcaster and former RSL defender Brian Dunseth recalls going to retrieve his paycheck, only to be told that he should prepare to join another team in an upcoming dispersal draft because his team was folding. Pastorino remembers executives around the league jokingly worrying what would happen if Phil Anschutz -- one of the league's early pioneers who once owned six of its teams -- "gets hit by a bus."

None of that is a reality, anymore.

Now, the league is busier attending to its valuable partnerships with corporate behemoths such as Visa and Microsoft, and planning for the next round of expansion that will result in 18 teams by 2011 -- 13 of which are expected to have their own stadiums. "That's something I never really dreamed could have happened," Garber said, "when we began really the first round of expansion" that included RSL.

Stadiums were a big problem early in the league's history; most teams were forced to rent huge NFL or college stadiums ill-suited to soccer, and strained to make money in part because they could not capitalize on game-day revenue such as parking and concessions.

Now, RSL's Rio Tinto Stadium is just one of five that have opened since 2005, with two more in New York and Philadelphia expected to open next year and perhaps three others -- in Portland, Kansas City and San Jose -- after that. Even with the addition of so many teams, overall attendance has remained basically the same; the huge success of some new teams such as Seattle has counterbalanced others that have slumped.

Yet it wasn't just one thing that suddenly turned MLS into a viable league.

Rather, the general broadening of interest in soccer -- aided by the Internet, which freed fans from having to rely on the scraps of news that traditional media afforded their teams -- combined with the willingness of investors such as Checketts to take a chance on the game to help slowly turn things around. It didn't hurt that the U.S. had reached the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, sparking new interest around the country.

"Clearly the sport of soccer in this country has become far more credible," Garber said. "More people care about it. It's more meaningful on a lot of levels, from the White House to the Statehouse in Utah, to local communities throughout the country. People care about the sport.

"The American brand of soccer has more credibility with our national team," he added. "Sponsors are spending more and believing that it can help them achieve their business goals. And when you put all those things together, it creates an increased value."

And isn't Checketts happy about that, now?

The Bountiful native and former Utah Jazz president laid out $10 million in 2004 for an expansion fee to land the franchise that would become RSL, and skeptics wondered whether he was throwing his money away on a league that so far had strained to gain a foothold. But by last year, investors were paying $30 million expansion fees for the Seattle Sounders and Philadelphia Union (which will begin play next season). The groups behind franchises in Portland and Vancouver that will join the league in 2011 reportedly paid $35 million each.

"You have to give some credit to Dave Checketts and his interests," said Kyle McCarthy, a longtime soccer writer for the Boston Herald and Goal.com. He and Chivas USA owner Jorge Vergara "took a gamble on an MLS team when the investment wasn't as sure as it could have been. They were kind of ahead of the curve a little bit."

It helped that the league utilized a "single-entity" system under which it owns all player contracts and controlled all the teams in an effort to keep costs down. That eventually helped draw new owners, who in turn have been lured by new measures to make ownership more attractive, such as the right to sell jersey sponsorships -- something RSL pioneered in the United States with its $1 million a year deal with Xango.

Today, the league has 16 owners for its 18 teams, and has not ruled out expanding again before 2012. A group in Montreal is lobbying hard for a team, having witnessed the phenomenal popularity of expansion teams in Toronto and Seattle the past few years.

"For sure, the league's growing," said Clint Mathis, the veteran RSL midfielder. "You don't have this many investors wanting to buy teams year after year after year if it's not growing."

Raising the bar

Success off the field has meant success on the field, too.

While most agree that MLS has miles to go before it's viewed alongside La Liga in Spain, the Premier League in England or the Bundesliga in Germany, the league has enjoyed an improving reputation over the last five years. One big reason is the "designated player" rule, instituted in 2007 to allow the Los Angeles Galaxy to afford Beckham despite the league's strict salary cap.

Under the rule, only the first $400,000 of a designated player's salary is applied against the salary cap; the rest simply must be paid by the team's owner. That has allowed star players such as Blanco, Angel and Ljungberg to join Beckham in showing their skills in MLS, while more young American players such as Jozy Altidore in turn have developed enough in MLS to draw interest from more prestigious leagues in Europe.

"The league has started to allow the clubs a little bit more control over their own teams, and their own acquisitions, surely," Kreis said. "At the beginning of the league, the league signed the players and gave them to the teams and I don't think they really had a choice, which players they got, or if they wanted somebody, it was too bad. ... Now, I think we're afforded the opportunity to go do our own scouting for players internationally. The league still makes signings but we can say who comes in."

"That has raised the level," he said.

And that growth also has fueled better exposure.

The league that used to have to pay to produce its own television broadcasts -- with most games not on television, anywhere -- now reportedly reaps about $25 million a year from broadcast rights, in its deals with ESPN/ABC, Fox Soccer Channel, HD Net and Univision that commenced in 2007. That's a pittance compared with the staggering $594 million that the English Premier League gets every year, but it has injected much-needed revenue into the league and afforded it widespread distribution.

The league enjoys weekly games on ESPN2, for example, which also will televise the annual All-Star Game from Rio Tinto Stadium on July 29, as well as dedicated programming on the other networks. Big games such as the season-opener and MLS Cup final are broadcast nationally on ABC, and the "Direct Kick" pay-per-view package on satellite and digital cable assures that every game is televised.

"It's all of those things working together that I believe are a real indictor that the sport just matters much more today than it did when this league was founded in 1996," Garber said.

The bottom line suggests as much.

While the league is not yet profitable, according to Forbes magazine, and generally avoids comparing itself to other major pro sports -- obviously, it is content to grow as best it can, unburdened by perhaps unrealistic expectations of competing with more established leagues -- Garber has said MLS is on track to make money by next year, and three teams are in the black.

None of them is RSL, but the local team certainly has done its part in helping build the league, at the forefront of a new era.

"That kick-started the momentum that we have been riding for the last number of years and has helped get us to where we are today," Garber said. "Without that first round of expansion, I don't believe we would be where we are today."

mcl@sltrib.com